After Babel

« The books I liked became a Bible from which I drew advice and support; I copied out long passages from them; I memorised […] psalms, proverbs, and prophecies, and I sanctified every incident in my life by the recital of these sacred texts. My emotions, my tears, and my hopes were no less sincere on account of that; the words and the cadences, the lines and the verses were not aids to make believe: but they rescued from silent oblivion all those intimate adventures of the spirit that I couldn’t speak to anyone about; they created a kind of communion between myself and those twin souls which existed somewhere out of reach; instead of living out my small private existence, I was participating in a great spiritual epic. »

— Simone de Beauvoir, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter

A language without rules could not communicate anything at all. It is because you and I agree on the rules of grammar that you can read this sentence and it has a meaning for you. What happens when we want to change our agreement?

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Akira Ifukube: Works for Guitar and Baroque Lute  Performed by Yoh Nishimura (guitar) and Deborah Minken (baroque lute)

Winter Wonderland, Maroon Bells, Near Aspen, Colorado, Photo by Gerald Hill

— Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

“I have preferred to teach my students not English literature but my love for certain authors, or, even better, certain pages, or even better than that, certain lines. One falls in love with a line, then with a page, then with an author. Well, why not? It is a beautiful process.” ― Jorge Luis Borges

Ugetsu Monogatari 1953 - Kenji Mizoguchi

Tina Uwase photographed by Marta Różycka for Krystian Szymczak

— Peter Matthiessen, The Snow Leopard (via malavermelha)

Trumpeter Swans. By M. Wheelock, 2014

"This, she thinks. All this. The cypresses like rows of upended paintbrushes, waiting for the giant hand of an artist, the low and subjugated wind, the jagged line of mountains drawn in charcoal on the horizon {...} She wants this. She feels the bliss of it all on her skin, like the graze of drizzle after a parching drought."

— Maggie O'Farrell, The Marriage Portrait

— C.P Cavafy, marginalia on John Ruskin in Cavafy: A Critical Biography by Robert Liddell

—light snow, silence, the empty streets, the fog, thrilling cold-so much beauty. Like breathing pure oxygen.

satonaka-chariot:

Ludvig Skramstad (December 30, 1855 — December 26, 1912)

Norwegian winter landscape with a man on his sleigh

The church of Raron is where Rainer Maria Rilke was buried.